Member Article

Siilo raises €4.5 million to bring secure instant messaging to healthcare worldwide

Siilo, the secure instant messaging app for healthcare professionals, has raised a €4.5 million funding round. Lead investor in the round is the EQT Ventures fund (“EQT Ventures”), with participation from existing investors. The funding will be used to scale-up Siilo’s user base across Europe, with a particular focus on the UK and Germany.

Medical professionals are faced with an increasingly fragmented healthcare system and outdated methods of communication, such as fax, pagers and landlines. This often results in key patient data being siloed and valuable time being wasted trying to get access to the right information. To ensure the right teams have access to vital patient data at the right time, healthcare professionals have taken matters into their own hands. According to British Medical Journal research, 98.9% of UK hospital clinicians now have smartphones, with about a third using consumer messaging apps in the clinical workplace.

These apps are not designed for the sharing of sensitive data and present significant compliance risks, as well as the possibility of fines for organisations and individuals under GDPR. Founded in 2016 by Joost Bruggeman, a surgery resident, Arvind Rao, and Onno Bakker, founder from mobile messaging app eBuddy, Siilo breaks down healthcare communication barriers and keeps patient data secure.

Personal and professional data is kept separate on the device, with patient information and related discussions stored in a secure encrypted vault created by Siilo. Content is not automatically backed-up to the cloud and synced across multiple devices in the household (as with consumer apps) and messages in Siilo are deleted every 30 days unless healthcare professionals request otherwise.

The app ensures medical teams can better manage their workflow, securely collaborate on patients’ treatments and discuss challenging cases with their peers. As well as having instant, direct access to colleagues working in their organization, doctors can also tap into a broader network of expertise by searching Siilo’s verified user base.

Siilo has achieved level 3 status assessed as a NHS Business Partner organisation type as defined by the NHS, which is the NHS’ highest level of Information Government compliance. With more 7.5 million messages processed per month and more than 100,000 users in renowned institutions such as St. George’s Hospital, London, and Charité Berlin, Germany, Siilo is already Europe’s largest secure messenger for healthcare. Organic adoption has also occurred in smaller home healthcare teams in California, US, and entire transplantation teams from Astana, Kazakhstan.

“Having worked in the trenches as a surgery resident, I’ve experienced the challenges that healthcare professionals face firsthand,” said Joost Bruggeman, CEO and co-founder, Siilo. “With Siilo, we’re connecting all healthcare professionals to make them more efficient, enable them to share patient information securely and continue learning and share their knowledge. The directory of vetted healthcare professionals helps ensure they’re successful team-players within a wider healthcare network that takes care of the same patient.”

“At Siilo, we coin this phenomenon ‘network medicine’, which is in contrast to the current old-fashioned, siloed medicine. The goal is to improve patient care overall, and patients have a network of doctors providing input into their treatment. Together with EQT Ventures, and the team’s knowledge of scaling businesses, we’re looking forward to moving the world of healthcare into the era of ’network medicine,” Bruggeman concluded.

“The EQT Ventures team was impressed with Siilo’s vision of creating a secure global network of healthcare professionals and the organic traction it has already achieved thanks to the team’s focus on building a product that’s easy to use,” said Ashley Lundström, venture lead and investment advisor to EQT Ventures. “The healthcare industry has long been stuck using jurassic technologies and Siilo’s real-time messaging app can significantly improve efficiency and patient care without putting patients’ data at risk.

Siilo’s secure messaging application is free for medical team players. Siilo Connect is the company’s subscription service for organisations and professional associations, providing extensive management, administration, networking and software integration tools.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Siilo .